In the post, Neil Dufton asks: How can we bring together imaging technology, art and philosophy to shape scientific research?
When we think of vascular health we are often guilty of presuming that we are primarily discussing the heart. Clearly the heart has a major role to play in regulating your blood flow; once our blood has exited the heart it must supply nutrients to every organ of our body and back to the heart in a cycle that takes about one minute. Any hindrance from a cholesterol-blocked artery or blood clot can have catastrophic results – however by the time we reach retirement our circulation will have exceeded 30 million laps around the body! This incredible feat is made possible by our blood vessels that not only form a vast network during your development in the womb, but are also constantly growing and remodelling throughout our life time. Our Vascular Science research group at the National Heart and Lung Institute is particularly interested in endothelial cells – the cells that line every blood vessel in our body. We want to understand how they work together to grow and form new vessels (a process called angiogenesis), as well as how they maintain these structures in response to injury and disease. (more…)